©2001 Jon Youngblood Unity Through Understanding A Guidebook for the Recently Alive

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Looking back on the past century, one cannot help but be amazed by the exponential increase in, what was once quaintly referred to as “progress”, though now more aptly referred to as “advancement”. Technology and industry within the last one hundred years has presented us with sweeping new ideas about, and ways of viewing, the world. Ways in which our ancestors could never have imagined in their wildest dreams. Consider technology. Where it once took centuries, or even millennium, to advance a new technology, we now see gargantuan leaps in a matter of just decades. Transportation, for example, required about four thousand five hundred years, at the least, to go from the domesticated pack animal to the steam engine. In less than two hundred years we have gone from the simple combustion engine (the charming “horse-less carriage” that used to frighten the feint of heart) to computerized, multi-staged, extra-planetary space shuttles! Communications had leaped from the pony express and wireless telegraphy, to overnight air freight, and high speed super-computers and the Internet. We have acquired vast sums of knowledge about the material world. And we have adapted to new ideas of personal freedom that would have stunned and confounded our forefathers. Not just the Puritans and other early settlers of this country, but those who lived just last century would also have found it difficult to fathom the attitudes or "head space" of their children’s, children’s, children living today. In just over a lifetime (albeit a very healthy and long lived one) we have come from the Victorian era's strict morality and religious domination of thought, to the "sexual revolution" of the 60's and the "me first" generations of the 80's and 90's. The world, it seems, is changing intellectually as well as physically, at an ever increasing rate. And the essence of who we are as sentient beings along with it. How these changes must affect the social and religious fabric of our lives is a question I shall attempt to address.

In the pages that follow, we will examine some of the myths and legends that predated and influenced the development of traditional religious thought. We will investigate the development of Faith, and it's expression through religion (primarily that of the Judaic Faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam)). And review some of the new religious “cults¹” that have come and gone within this century past. We will examine other world religions and how their teachings have come to play an increasing role in the United States since the mid 1900’s.

Next, we shall explore how science has modified our "world view" in recent times, both of the physical and the spiritual. I will show how science, far from being the enemy of established religious thought, did in fact arise out of philosophical debate within the early church, and was wholly supported (and financed) by our religious institutions as a means of seeking out and discovering the true nature of God. And that the success of science (to discover the nature of God) having been achieved (beyond their wildest expectations) has caused much irrational distress to many of the traditional faiths who started the whole business in the first place. The “Elect of God”, from Rabbi to Reverend, Pastor to Priest, found that they no longer cornered the market on God and His miracles. What lead to the creation of “a new spirit of autonomy and independence which led some to declare their independence of God.²”?  And why did Darwin take the rap? What do we really know and understand about the world God created? Our bodies. Our Planet. Our Universe. What does science tell us about the nature of God? How does it compare with the inspired truths of our religious heritage? Can our faith ever become fact?

Attempting to answer that question, I will, finally, reflect on ways in which it may be possible to maintain ties with our religious heritage in an age of technology. By allowing the observational truth of today’s world to inspire a new image of God. The same God that has always been, and will always be; by whatever name we choose to use; whatever image we hold in our mind. Higher Power or Enlightened One. One of my objectives here is, through comparative theology, to lend credibility to the notion that all of the apparent differences in religious ideologies is only the differences in perspective as shown by the parable of the Three Blind Men³ . And further, present some basic concepts of today’s science to explain concepts such as holism and how they may provide a means of uniting Faith and Physics.

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^{#1:  cult: (Amer. Her. 3rd Ed.) 1.a. A religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader. b. The followers of such a religion or sect. 2. A system or community of religious worship and ritual. 3. The formal means of expressing religious reverence; religious ceremony and ritual. 4. A usually nonscientific method or regimen claimed by its originator to have exclusive or exceptional power in curing a particular disease. 5.a. Obsessive, especially faddish, devotion to or veneration for a person, principle, or thing. b. The object of such devotion. 6. An exclusive group or persons sharing an esoteric, usually artistic or intellectual interest.  [Back to Text]}

^{#2:  Karen Armstrong - A History of God; pg 346 /Ballantine Books [Back to Text]}

^{#3:  Adapted from a Famous Sufi Story : Once there was a poor Persian village where all were blind. One day a strange new creature called an elephant appeared at the village wall. Since no one in the village had ever heard of an elephant, the three wisest of the blind villagers went out to discover what the new creature was like. They all felt the creature. The first blind sage felt the tail and said, "This creature cannot be an elephant, this is a rope!" The second blind sage felt the leg and said, "No, this is a tree!" The third blind sage felt the side and said, "No, you fools, this is a wall!"}

^{As the three sages argued amongst themselves, a lesser blind man, not knowing any better, mounted the elephant and rode away. [Back to Text]}